Beets, Beets, Beets

I have always eaten beets from a can, and I like them. They turn my fingers pink, and taste sweet and earthy. Not to mention eating something straight out of the can is so easy and convenient. Except, I always feel so guilty for eating any food that comes in a package. It is sooooooooooooo wasteful.

So I bought beets at the farmers' market in part because my boyfriend who lives far away got some in a produce basket he receives weekly, and he hated them. I am determined to find a way to perfect the eating of beets so that he will love them. (He lives far away, so I was not a part of his initial experimentation with beets.) I also bought some carrots. It was a weekend for purchasing roots, I guess. I will probably cook up the beet leaves the same way I do Swiss chard. I'm not sure how I will cook the actual beets.

One plan is to shred a beet with some carrots to eat over salad.

I also plan to roast some beets with cumin, lime, and mint--as recommended by a recipe card I received from the farmers' market. I may post the recipe and more detail on how this adventure goes when I do it.

Finally, I am contemplating a good mole-fashioned deeper'n'ever-turinip'n'tater'n'beet-root pie. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you clearly never read Brian Jacques Redwall series as a child. I have made this long-monikered pie out of the Redwall Cookbook (the stories were originally written for blind children, so they feature a lot of food talk to engage alternate senses), but it didn't include beets in it. The beets were served on the side. I wonder if that's because of a conflict of flavors or an issue with color.

Regardless, once I have roasted a few beets and get a sense of how I can blend them with seasonings, I will probably tackle developing my own deeper'n'ever-turinip'n'tater'n'beet-root pie. The cookbook's version is pretty bland and required a lot of salt and pepper. Its carrot layer was definitely the best part, but there are no carrots in the name. I can't remember if they were in the description. I may or may not include carrots in my version. We shall see.

You should eat beets, too. I will argue that they are good for you because beet juice and beets were included in a colon cleanse I did with my mom a few years ago, though my friend Molly warns that eating raw beets in large quantities can be dangerous because it is a blood cleanser. She also overshared that your pee can turn pink. That's never happened to me as a result of eating canned beets, but I suppose my adventures in farmers' market beets my have a different result.